Session Recap
Personalization: For Web and Beyond
October 22, 2020 — Our virtual session featured a discussion with martech leaders, Faylene Bell of NVIDIA, Marissa Eddings of 7-Eleven, and Maxine Eiland of SailPoint, on how to assign web visitors to audience segments, templatize email personalization modules, and use data to drive the experience.
Featured experts
This Time, it’s personal: Framework for multi-channel personalization
The title of this session, “Personalization: For Web and Beyond,” sums up the framework of the discussion. Here’s how we look at personalization across all touch points in a customer journey:
- For Web: Creating relevance for engagement and conversion
- And Beyond: Creating a total experience for lasting customer relationship value
Four Critical Factors of Effective Personalization
Strategy: Well-grounded and well-fitted
- Why personalize? What’s the business result? Make sure you’re well-grounded with results-driven goals when implementing personalization. Strategize with key metrics in mind.
- What kinds of personalization should you use? Be mindful of resource management. If your organization offers multiple products or services to a variety of customer segments, personalization can quickly become an extensive process. Start with a segmentation prioritization plan when considering the best kinds of personalization for your current campaigns.
- How much is enough? Keep it simple and don’t over-complicate. Your personalization strategy should be well-fitted with your organization’s tech and team resources.
- How much is too much? Pay attention to the “creepiness factor” — make sure you’re using personalization features that are relevant to your business. Don’t use irrelevant data in a way that can appear creepy to your customers.
Activation: Enabling the full stack
- Siloed vs. unified: Data silos can prevent your marketing team from being properly equipped to execute advanced personalization.
- Granularity vs. manageability: Don’t get too granular with the data to the point that it would be difficult to pull actionable insights for personalization.
- Raw data vs. refined signals: Focus on the data points that will help you collect the right information for personalization.
- Manual/batch upkeep vs. automated/continuous: Have a process in place to refresh and update your customer data. Using outdated data for personalization (i.e. old job titles, companies, etc.) could turn your customers away.
Data: Actionable data signals
- Where is the most important place to start personalizing? Pick your most relevant channels (ex: web, e-commerce, email) for implementation.
- Mind any critical integrations. Connecting the rest of your marketing channels with your starting point is critical to the expansion of your personalization strategy across your full stack.
- There are some martech stack architectures where personalization decisions happen toward the "center" of the stack (i.e. real-time personalization interaction systems or predictive content driven by artificial intelligence). Conversely, “edge” personalization is the concept of enabling personalization tools per channel.
Process: Continuous advancement
The following elements will continue to build throughout the process of implementing and optimizing your personalization strategy:
- KPIs
- Data flows
- Stepwise evolution
- Organizational advancement
Discussion and takeaways: Advice from our experts
Each expert demonstrated the ways they’ve led personalization efforts at their organizations. Here’s how they summed up their advice on accomplishing effective B2B and B2C personalization:
Eiland: If you’re brand new to the personalization world and you’re just getting started, get scrappy. Test and try. Start with simple A/B testing to see if engagement has increased from it, and then iterate from there.
Eddings: Involve all key stakeholders and teams as early as possible to understand what dependencies exist in the gap and to get a full view of the entire landscape.
Bell: Make sure data governance is part of the process — be mindful of the data flowing in and out of your systems in order to ensure the optimal foundation for web personalization.
Related resources
Watch the recording
For more insights and takeaways from the session, watch the full recording here: